Just some more about the Segway riding parking enforcement officer

We have a story today about one of the parking enforcement officers riding around on Segways.

Here’s a couple of bits that didn’t make the story.

Nanette Toyoshima said there was one scary time, back when she was first on the job:

She was riding in one of parking enforcement’s carts back then when she came across a car with chicken wire on the windows. The door was padlocked. She was writing a ticket when a man showed up. “He had duct-tape covering his face and his arms,” she said. And he was carrying an axe.

She radioed the police dispatcher, so new she worried about getting into trouble.

But the man used the axe to knock the padlock off, pulled off the chicken wire and opened the window. Then he pushed the car into a slow roll and jumped in through the window.

As the story said, she did some research about the beginnings of parking enforcement officers in Seattle. Here’s what she wrote in the parking enforcement unit’s newsletter:

“On November 25, 1957, a curious sight met the eyes of the thousands of Christmas shoppers that crowded the streets of downtown Seattle. The first Parking Checkers, 20 women in all, began issuing tickets to vehicles that were parked overtime at the meters.

Dressed in tailored blue uniforms and known to all as “meter maids”, the Parking Checkers were selected through civil service examinations and had completed a two week course of training…

“Headed up by Miss Geraldine Lange, the first Parking Checker Supervisor, the women increased parking revenue by 25% and had written 11,895 tickets – and won both the praise and the ire of business owners and shoppers. Numerous letters to the editor graced the pages of the Seattle Times. People decried having women write tickets, stating that it was “unnatural” and that a woman’s place was in the home. Others claimed the “meter maids” were going to drive people from downtown and ruin businesses.”